


look out for those beauties

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Labyrinth (1986), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: I had to add this to AO3 because I'm very smug about it, Multi, NO ONE KNOWS, Tumblr Prompt, WHY IS THIS A REAL FIC NOW?, shut up i'm hilarious
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:55:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8970817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Sarah Williams left college, bought a motorcycle, and decided to see the country.  She's a little skeptical of the town she's found now, though.





	1. never my scene

**Author's Note:**

> So I did a meme on my Tumblr with people sending in songs for AU's, and someone decided to see what happened if they sent in Bicycle Race by Queen, which is where the title's from. I have no explanation for this AU except that it was very nearly the story of how Rusty Ryan from Ocean's 11 left Night Vale via Job Fair. This seems...nominally more sensical? But I had to put it on AO3 because I was so delighted with myself for managing to pull it off.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl,” the girl with the long hair murmurs, “and what no one knew was that the King of the Goblins had fallen in love with the girl, and he had given her certain powers.  Which I _thought_ included a sense of direction, but clearly not,” she adds with a scowl, her helmet tucked under one arm and her hip propped against the motorcycle behind her.  “Snickers, where are we?”

The goblin in question peers out of her pack—where she firmly stuffed him out of sight because _wow_ she is not explaining that to any cops who happen to pull her over—and stares, wide-eyed, up at the town in front of them.  It looks…odd.  The town, not the goblin, Snickers looks pretty much how he normally does except slightly less chocolate-smeared, because it’s been a good six hours since their last stop at a gas station and his beloved candy bars have since run out.  But the town…

Well.  Sarah’s not going to call the Arbys with the glowing lights overhead, the park in the distance surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire (helpfully labeled ‘Dog Park: Do Not Enter, Look At, or Think About’ to Sarah’s unusually good eyes), or the house apparently under a pillar of divine light the weirdest thing she’s ever seen.  But she’s maybe considering adding it to the list.

“Sign,” Snickers says, and extends a three-clawed hand to point.  Snickers, honestly, is a strong contender for the weirdest thing she’s ever seen because—what the _hell—_ he’s a goblin who seems perfectly happy on a motorcycle.  Even Ludo was dubious of the motorcycle, and Hoggle almost tore out his minimal hair at the thought of Sarah dropping out of college to wander for a while.  But she never seems to run out of money, always finding a dropped credit card or a few tens lying about, and the few times someone’s been foolish enough to try to rob her they have suffered mysterious avian bombardments from unusually aggressive wildlife, so she figures she’ll stop when she finds somewhere worth staying.  Or when Himself pulls himself together enough to come ask her out like a regular person rather than just…arranging her life conveniently.  She’s pretty sure that’s a long time coming, though.

“Thanks, Snicks,” she says absently, and stuffs Snickers back into the pack as she looks at the sign at the town limits.

 _Welcome to Night Vale,_ it declares cheerfully under the motif of a purple eye with the crescent moon at its center.  _Population: Up to Interpretation.  Please leash all eldritch monstrosities and help keep our town beautiful!_

Sarah observes the sign for a few moments, waiting for the letters to reshuffle themselves, or perhaps peel themselves away and perform a tap dance.  No such thing occurs, so she pops her helmet securely on the handlebars of her bike and drives into Night Vale.

She makes it all of two blocks, just far enough to pass the Arbys at the far edge of town and realize that the sky isn’t quite the right color—it’s full daylight, but she would venture to call the sky _indigo_ , maybe—before an old woman with riotous curls strolls out onto the street in front of her, smooth as you please.  The old woman wouldn’t be a problem, Sarah’s reflexes are excellent, but the thing trailing docilely behind her looks like it belongs in one of the Labyrinth’s stranger turns.  It’s eight feet tall, with skin in a shade of ebony black you just don’t get without some serious polish, and eyes on every bit of visible skin, except where eyes are normally found.  It also has a sum total of six wings and Sarah can’t quite figure out how they’re coming out of the back of its very thick, clearly hand-knitted sweater. 

So Sarah comes to a stop, because it’s best not to antagonize unknown entities with motorcycle crashes, no matter how docile they look in their sweaters.

The old woman leads her black-skinned friend—Sarah’s not one to judge, and they seem to be having a perfectly nice conversation, even if the optically overenthusiastic thing (possible name according to the old woman: Erika) seems to be communicating mostly in bursts of static—across the street and onto the sidewalk.  Sarah watches them go, a bit bemused, and concludes that, all other questions aside, clearly the thing isn’t an eldritch monstrosity, because the sign said those had to be leashed, and places like this tend to adhere religiously to their own rules, in her experience.  So there’s that.

She’s about to keep going when someone else—this time distinctly human-shaped—bursts into a run and bolts onto the street and (gods and demons, this man is insane) actually _grabs her arm_. 

There’s a really _ugly_ moment where the world seems to hold its breath, the indigo sky purpling toward a dangerous mauve, and one of the distantly circling birds shows far too much interest in this probably-benign mortal for Sarah’s liking.  She helps save Unfortunate Mystery Man’s life by peeling his hand off the place where he’s starting to bruise her wrist, and everything goes back to itself.

“Hi,” Sarah says, perfectly friendly because there’s no reason not to be and unsuccessfully attempting to shove Snickers back into his pack.  He always gets overcurious when Sarah’s…certain powers start to act up.  She suspects he may have orders as her bodyguard, as ineffective as a thirteen-inch-tall goblin might be.  “Can I help you, Mister…?”

“Carlos,” the man says, looking apologetic now.  “Everyone here just calls me Carlos.  Except for the people who call me Mister Scientist, and I’d _really_ rather you didn’t.”  Sarah nods, looking him over.  He is, in fact, wearing a lab coat.  She also notes that he has perfectly straight teeth, and hair that she’s actually envious of, even though her own never seems to tangle.  “And I’m sorry I grabbed you, I should know better than to grab people in this town…and you seem remarkably calm about Old Woman Josie and Erika,” he observes.

“I’ve seen weirder,” Sarah says dryly.

“Well, I used to say the same—what on _earth_ is that?”

Sarah closes her eyes, because Snickers has gotten loose and now she’ll probably never get him back in the pack without a truly prodigious offering of chocolate.  The man—Carlos—doesn’t seem shocked or horrified, more deeply and delightedly curious.

“Snickers!” she snaps, opening her eyes, and Snickers stops trying to unzip the other pack in his quest for candy bars.  “Sorry, Carlos, what were you saying?  And Snickers is…well.” 

“I take it back, maybe you have seen weirder.  Is it some kind of mutant?” Carlos asks, interested.  “We have the barking spiders, but they never get so big, and--”

“He’s a goblin,” Sarah interrupts.  “I…sort of won him.”

Snickers offers a smile with a truly terrific number of pointed white teeth, and says, “Got to go on bike with Queen.  Fun-fun!”

“Don’t call me that, please,” Sarah says wearily.  “Himself has to actually _ask_.  Like a person.”  Snickers bursts into gales of riotous cackles, and Sarah takes the opportune moment to jam him back into his pack and zip him in.  “Sorry, Carlos, what did you want?”

“Well,” Carlos says, taking a deep breath.  “My wildlife and air temperature readings have been getting very strange, and Cecil’s sky forecasts are usually right on the mark, but look at this!  Blue as a sapphire, when today was supposed to be taupe at best!”  He flails an arm at the sky, and Sarah blinks at him.  “And everyone’s complaining of strange dreams— _pleasant_ for once, so you’d think they’d count their blessings, but no.  And of course there’s the fact that the storage closet in Cecil’s radio station has apparently been replaced with a large ballroom,” he adds, apparently upon consideration.

“Right, who’s Cecil, and what does this have to do with me?  And does the ballroom look…inhabited?”  Sarah frowns, trying to come up with a good way to ask ‘like a faerie-wrought peach-borne hallucination,’ but can’t think of anything delicate.

Carlos flushes under his dark skin, shuffling awkwardly, and grins a little as he says, “Cecil’s my boyfriend.  He’s the Voice of Nightvale.  He says that this sort of confusion _seems_ to suggest a multi-dimensional sort of overlap, and that there’s probably a person providing the focal point.  You’re the first new arrival in…a while, so I got a little overexcited.  And the ballroom is something of a wreck, actually, it looks like the wall was made of glass and someone smashed it with--”

“A chair,” Sarah says with another sigh.  “It was a chair.”  She rakes both hands through her hair and says, “All right, Mister Scientist.  Let’s go meet your boyfriend.”


	2. so self-satisfied

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wrote more of this.
> 
> Disclaimer: I absolutely DO NOT have time to be writing this and furthermore have approximately 2% of a plan for the plot, so therefore updates will be sporadic AF.

The radio station is plain, Sarah notes—red-brown brick, single-story, with a sign that says _Night Vale Public Radio_ in thin purple letters.  Three windows on one side are painted red from the inside, a deep and calming color that completely obscures even shadows, and inside the lobby is a wall inscribed with an endless list of names in gold, entitled _In Memoriam Adiutorum_ , but otherwise it all seems quite normal.

Well.  There’s the one door stamped _Management_ in peeling letters, with a red-painted window in the door and a faint smell as of lightning and fresh blood, and Sarah is tempted to try and open it just _because_.  She might die, but she might live, and if she lived she’d know what was on the other side.  But Sarah doesn’t try the door and Carlos hustles her past it as if just waiting for something ferocious to reach out through the crack beneath the wood.

The storage closet is marked with a sign that looks old and worn enough that Sarah suspects it’s been used before, more than once, announcing _Enter at own risk: contents unknown_.

“I like this town,” Sarah says dryly as Carlos raps on a door, and Snickers, scampering at her heels, giggles.

“Ah, beautiful Carlos,” booms a deep voice as the door crashes open to reveal a perfectly ordinary man.  His voice is like velvet, rich and lush, but it’s the only remarkable thing about him.  His edges are raw, in a strange way, as if he’s the only other real thing in a dream world Sarah’s created for herself.  Again.  His face is neither handsome nor ugly, his build neither lean nor heavy, even his hair neither dark nor light.  He is _ordinary_.

“Cecil!” Carlos says, and kisses the ordinary man on the lips emphatically.  Sarah smiles and looks away to give them a moment of privacy, and the moment she looks away, the smile drops.

“Hey,” she interrupts, stepping forward with Snickers deathly silent at her heel.  She’s not afraid of this ordinary man whose face she can’t remember even just a moment after seeing him, and she doesn’t plan to let him _make_ her afraid.  So she catches him by the shoulder—he’s solid enough, and certainly Carlos is close to human—and gives him a light shove as she advances on him.  “Whatever you’re doing to me, turn it off.”

“I beg your pardon?” ordinary Cecil asks, astonished.

“I can’t describe you,” Sarah says.  “I’m looking right at you and I can’t even tell how tall you are.  I can’t remember if I had to reach up to grab you or if Carlos had to bend down to kiss you, you’re just a blank spot.  And I don’t care to have my senses toyed with,” she says, a faint smile on her lips.  “It makes me cruel.”

“And who are _you_ , my fascinating new friend?” Cecil asks, catching Sarah’s hand when she goes to push him and bowing over it like a proper knight.  She wonders if she can borrow the mirror in the bathroom and check in on Sir Didymus and Hoggle, and files it as a possibility.

“My name is Sarah,” she says, reckless, and waits to see if he knows her.

“And how can you tell that I’m not quite…status quo, shall we say?”

“Long years of practice.  Now, either explain yourself or turn it off.”

Cecil smiles, still touching her hand, and this time she can see a little better.  His eyes, of indeterminate but soothing color, crinkle kindly at the corners, and he has dimples, and unusually pointed canines.  “I’m afraid it doesn’t turn off, Miss Sarah.  It’s simply how I am.  You’ll adjust.”  He pauses, considering, and adds, “Or you’ll go mad, of course, but don’t worry, we broke with tradition years ago on the matter of sacrificing the mad.  Terribly prejudicial, you know.”

“Lovely teeth you have, Voice of Night Vale,” Sarah observes.

“There, you see, you’re adjusting already.”  He drops her hand and claps, turning to Carlos.  “And why have you brought this peculiar creature here, darling Carlos?”

“I’m not a creature, I’m perfectly human,” Sarah says politely, and Cecil gives her a glance that she tentatively interprets as startled.

“Well, humans are creatures.”

“Not by my usual definitions,” she says.

“Goblins is creatures!” Snickers bursts out gleefully, apparently reaching his threshold for silence now that it’s evident that the Voice of Night Vale doesn’t dine on Labyrinthine Champions, and Sarah sighs.

“Yeah, Snicks,” she confirms.  She looks back at Cecil, still watching her with interest.  “Your scientist thought I might be the center of your—what—dimensional overlap?  And it sounds like he’s right,” Sarah says.  She grins, fast and crooked, with a cocky jerk of her chin, the smile that challenged a king, and adds, “My apologies.”

Cecil pounces on her at once, snatching her hand again and towing her back down the hall toward the blocked storage closet.  “Oh, don’t apologize,” he says—gushes, really.  Sarah is reluctant to be endeared by a mysterious someone whose face she still can’t quite see, but Cecil is undeniably charming.  Carlos looks at his ordinary face like a lovesick puppy, all stricken smile and warm eyes, and Cecil’s enthusiasm is irresistible.  She smiles, bemused, as he continues.  “Really, it’s been quite exciting.  Of course the dreams are certainly terribly unnerving—you start to miss the old howling nightmares about being swallowed by the shadows behind the Big Rico’s, you know?”

Sarah assumes this is a rhetorical question at first, but Cecil’s gaze is expectant, and so after a moment she says, “Mm, I couldn’t say.”

It seems to be good enough for him, because he nods understandingly and looks away, coming to a stop in front of the door to the storage closet.  The sign is still there, and Sarah smothers a smirk of amusement at its frank warning.

“Now, we haven’t sent anyone inside yet because Carlos said we should try to get some proper answers first—we go through so many interns as it is, we really can’t afford to be sending them into unknown dimensional pockets—and I thought that was quite brilliant,” Cecil tells her.  He looks over his shoulder to Carlos and smiles, easily as soppy and lovesick as Carlos himself. 

Sarah shakes her head at the pair of them, mildly appalled by their…everything, and briskly unhooks the sign.  “Here, Cecil,” she says, handing it over.  The door isn’t locked, handle twisting easily when she lays a hand on it, and she takes a deep breath to brace herself before she cracks it open.

The air inside should be stale, but instead it gusts out warm and sweet-scented.

“Peaches,” she mutters, absolutely dire, and pushes the door the rest of the way open.

The ballroom looks just like the remembers it, all delicate white walls and crystal chandeliers, with draped curtains turning the open space into something softer and sunken places in the floor littered with cushions.  There’s even a fallen mask, a fierce heraldic eagle’s beak and plumage on a slender wand, near one of the cushion pits. 

And, of course, there’s the shattered mirror wall.  It’s _just_ like she remembers.

Glass is scattered across the floor in fragments, some as big as Sarah’s splayed hand, others so small they’re like glitter.  The broken mirror juts from the floor and the ceiling like teeth.  The chair is abandoned on its side, and—yes—there’s a bit of fabric still caught on one of the jagged pieces still joined to the floor.  The wall opens on blue-blackness and stars, of a sky Sarah doesn’t recognize, twisting and warping by the second.

Carlos lets out a faint sound, somewhere between terror and fascinated longing—probably wondering how the air stays in, Sarah thinks absently.  Snickers coos at Sarah’s heel, a muted and reverent _pretty_. 

Sarah steels herself and takes a single step inside and, when no one immediately appears to stop her, walks across the room to the mirror wall.  The ballroom is silent, not even her footsteps making a sound as she goes, peaches on her tongue and stars in her eyes.  The quiet makes some part of her chest ache distantly, and her skin crackles with some hot flare that can’t be wholly categorized as anger.

“This is mine,” she says, bending down and picking up the white material.  There’s a seed pearl sewn onto the crisp white fabric, with silver thread.  “Sort of.”

“You’ve been here before?” Cecil asks, and starts forward as if to follow her into the ballroom.

Sarah holds out her empty hand to stop him, still looking at the scrap of dress in her hand.  “I wouldn’t,” she warns, putting steel into her voice.  “This place is unfriendly enough to the people who are _supposed_ to be here.”

Cecil stops, and Sarah’s relieved, but she can’t deny that the ballroom—the Labyrinth—doesn’t feel unfriendly toward her, this time around.  It feels like…watching a Disney movie with Toby in her lap and listening to him judge the music in his solemn little voice, she decides after a moment.  Easy, warm, almost like home.  She hasn’t felt much at home since she was fifteen, as if the world is a poorly tailored jacket, too loose across her shoulders and too tight around her ribs.  Traveling eases it, a little.

Standing in the Labyrinth eases it even more.

“Oh God,” Sarah says in mild horror.  She drops the fabric and brushes her hands off briskly, sweeping her entire train of thought out of her mind just as quickly.  “You’ve got a leak,” she says as she strides out of the ballroom and closes the door with a firm crash behind her.  “For some reason you’re hooked up to the Labyrinth—do you know about the Labyrinth?  You can probably get to the main body of it through the broken window, but I wouldn’t, like, recommend it.  The landing is pretty rough.”

“Labyrinth?” Carlos asks blankly.

“We already have a labyrinth in town, I’m afraid,” Cecil says, serene.  “It’s through the freezer door in the McDonald’s.”

“Not _a_ labyrinth, _the_ Labyrinth,” Sarah says, scrubbing her hands over the fabric of her jeans.  “The Underground, you know?  Himself probably thinks he’s playing a fine trick.  Snicks, don’t touch that,” she adds sharply, and Snickers pulls his hand back from the doorknob.

Carlos looks at Sarah with a new sort of interest, a critical look.  A far more aware look than the cheerfully curious one in Cecil’s pale eyes (possible eye colors: green, blue, silver, Sarah can’t tell).  “The Labyrinth,” he says, just as blank as before.

“Yeah, it’s like…faerieland,” she says, wrinkling her nose delicately at the inaccuracy.

Carlos’ dark head dips once in a slow nod, his skin not quite paling but definitely taking on a grey sheen, and he doesn’t say another word.

Cecil, almost bouncing with excitement, leans forward and bursts out, “So, may I ask, _what_ is the Labyrinth?”

Sarah blinks, brought back with a thud to reality, or what passes for it in this peculiar town.  “Oh, right.”  A faint, thin smile curves her lips and she says, “Let me tell you a story.  Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl, and her father and stepmother left her home to care for her baby brother.  But the girl was a spoiled child, and the baby was crying….”


End file.
